It’s difficult to overstate the contempt Charlotte’s government feels for its citizens. Though disdain for the people is widely distributed among our elected officials, high-ranking bureaucrats, and well-connected members of the governing class, perhaps no one personifies it like Assistant City Manager Tracy Dodson, whose duties as director of economic development require her to act […]
Charlotte cops punched and pummeled a woman at a public bus stop on a public street, but they insisted on privacy when discussing their assault upon her, and we, as a political community, went along. After a few of his officers beat Christina Pierre in November 2023, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Chief Johnny Jennings announced plans […]
On April 1, 1997, at the age of twenty, I sat in the meeting chamber of Charlotte’s government center as a narrowly divided board of county commissioners, over raucous objections from hundreds of people, codified homophobia in Mecklenburg County. I had been walking out of my dorm at Queens University of Charlotte the week before […]
Odd as it sounds, I just can’t shake the memory of a recent Charlotte City Council meeting — and the lesson it teaches about our broken politics and bankrupt public ethics. At the meeting, which occurred in November 2021, Council considered two items: First, it voted to award $75 million in tax breaks and other […]
Maybe Patrick Cannon spoiled us when it comes to spotting municipal corruption in Charlotte. In 2014, investigators captured video of the disgraced former mayor taking cash bribes of about $50,000 in exchange for promises to do favors for federal agents posing as developers. So egregious was Cannon’s behavior, which resulted in a resignation, federal charges, […]
Developers and realtors seeking to derail Charlotte’s promotion of equitable, inclusionary growth and development have found a helpful ally: one of their own who was installed several years ago atop the city’s bureaucracy. Tracy Dodson, who serves as assistant city manager and director of economic development, recently wrote a three-page memo to Taiwo Jaiyeoba, who […]
The public has had too much say in crafting Charlotte’s future, developers will tell Mayor Vi Lyles this week, and they are asking elected officials to postpone finalization of a suite of policies to guide the city’s growth in coming decades. The delay, developers hope, will give them more time to pressure City Council into […]
City Council will soon decide whether real change is coming to law enforcement in Charlotte. What’s been done so far is not encouraging. Consider, for example, how elected officials and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department leaders described the city’s recent compliance with the 8 Can’t Wait initiative, a suite of minimalist changes advanced by Campaign Zero, which […]
Risking the credibility essential to their work, county health officials publicly gave their blessing last month to local universities’ plans to reopen amidst the pandemic — while at the same time privately expressing worry about some of those plans. “Their plans are good,” Gibbie Harris, the director of Mecklenburg County’s health department, said at an […]
City Council thinks it has a problem. Not, mind you, an ethics problem. But an image problem. A public relations problem. An optics problem. The recent flurry of ethics complaints against Charlotte’s elected officials looks bad, and that, perhaps unlike corruption, is intolerable. “I think what we need to do now is to stop the […]
Charlotte Citizen 